


Sun Chaser

by wildechilde17



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: 8:06, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fix It, Ser Dadvos, where to milady
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 07:57:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18912781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildechilde17/pseuds/wildechilde17
Summary: If you have to learn how to be yourself again why do you need to do it alone





	Sun Chaser

“They said they had to get permission before I came aboard,” he says looking up from her from the dock below.

“What are you doing here?”

He spreads his hands out wide; they are cleaner than she has ever seen them. “I would have thought that was plain for all to see.” 

“Milady?” Stephas asks concerned from her elbow. 

Arya waves him off, “I’ll deal with him.”

“Oh so some get to call you a Lady,” he says with a smile in his voice even if it isn’t in his face. His face against the black of his doublet is all angles now. Angles and eyes that catch the blue of the bay. “Or is it Princess now.”

“No,” she says though he hasn’t meant it as a question. “That’s not me.” She had thought her hands were resting behind her back and she only notices now that they grip the cleat holding them to the mooring tight enough to drain the colour from her hands. “Go back to your castle and lands, stupid.”

“You do like to play the princess when it suits, don’t you?” He shakes his head. He picks up a sack and war hammer from his feet. “Way I see it, if you’re not a lady or a princess I out rank you.” She follows him with her eyes refusing to move as he makes his way up the gang plank, “I’m coming aboard.” 

“You’re an idiot.”

“Aye and that stops right now.” 

“What?”

He sighs not yet taking a step onto the decking, “You’ve been calling me stupid and an idiot and a bull since we were shit covered, starved children” he says with the firm tone he’d used before slamming an axe into the heart of a tree stump, “and it stops now.”

She raises an eyebrow, “It stops?”

“You may terrify all of the six kingdoms but…” the side of his mouth twitches in the pause, “I am not an apprentice sold into service, a prisoner escaping from hell, I am not a nameless smith amongst the brotherhood without banners any longer.”

“Who are you then? Lord Baratheon?” 

“I am your fucking family, Arya of house Stark.” He says her name softer than the flea bottom accent that colours the curse should allow. He says her name the same way her mother would. In the two syllable, absence of the hard r, soft way her mother’s river land voice would curl the word. If she was playing the game of faces she would say he speaks the truth.

But it isn’t the truth. “You are n…” she begins.

“Yes, I am!” He dips a little at the waist bringing his eyes level with hers, “Your siblings may accept your leaving. I’ll not say anything against them but…”

“I will slit your throat.”

He snorts at this, “As milady says.” She wants to push him down, push him off the plank and into the sea. Let the drowned god have him. “Often,” he says smirking. 

“I am leaving,” she says instead. “I may never come back this way.” 

He only nods, “And if you mean to fall off the edge of the world then I mean to follow you over.”

She lowers her brows, “You are a lord with lands and people…”

“And none of it means anything without family.”

“So go,” she says slipping her hands from the cleat and steadfastly refusing to stretch them in his presence. She loops them together behind her back, “Find a soft, pretty lady and put a babe in her belly.” Her voice sounds hollow to her ears and she watches him to make certain he has not heard it.

“And that stops too.” He steps over the threshold and lets the hammer fall heavily on the sole. 

“You don’t get to tell me…”

His hands are on the point that shoulders meet arm. His hands are open like he fears closing them against her skin even if it is through layers of wool and leather. “Stop telling me to be someone other than who I am.” The colour rises in his face. The last time he dared to stand here like this his face was made ruddy with newly acquired rank and northern ale but now it is nothing more than the Baratheon fury he had never before had a name for. “You never liked it when others did it to you. Show me the same courtesy. I am, after all, the stupid fool who loves you.”

“Stupid?” she swallows against it. She doesn’t move from his loose grip.

He huffs, a humourless blast of breath but the words that follow are calmer. “I didn’t say you were wrong,” he says as his hands slide from her arms. His warmth goes with him. Her eyes follow the trail of him.

“Is that all you’ve brought?” 

“I have a hammer; I’ve no need for finery,” he shrugs. 

She raises her eyes from the sack, “So what’s the Baratheon leathers in aid of?”

He is clean to the point of almost sweet smelling. His hair is perhaps a little longer but as black as the leather he wears. He looks every part the Lord of a great holdfast. She wants to reach out and fold his hand over her own if only to feel the rough skin years of work created and months of lording could not take away. He is beautiful in every way her smith was not. 

“I’ve lived in dead man’s clothes and what I could scrounge for long enough. I’m not throwing away clothes made for me just because you prefer me without a shirt. It’s still winter even if you ended the long night and the sea gets more than cool when the sun goes…” he witters.

“I do not prefer you without a shirt!” she insists and turns her face towards the harbour hoping to hide the sudden flush of heat.

“Aye, as you say.” He is laughing at her. Without laughter, she knows he is laughing at her.

“I didn’t ask you to come.”

“You did.” She turns back on him. She did no such thing. “A long time ago. I should have followed then but I’m stubborn and bull headed and it took me too long…”

She doesn’t want to hear the repeat of memories that she tried so hard to lose. “We don’t have the quarters for another.”

“I’ll make do.”

“Gendry.” There is hope in his eyes when he looks at her. She has no want to break his heart again but there is no time to do it softly. There is no time for a gentle death. And she is certain that this must die.

He frowns, sudden and hard, “I’m not sorry. I’ll not pretend I’m sorry for the things I said. Even if they… they’re said now and I meant them.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, she thinks, he wants to put them on her. And by the old Gods she wants them on her. There is a twitch in his cheek that speaks of a smile he is supressing and his eyes flick back and forth denying an urge to focus anywhere but the colourless grey of her own eyes. “But I mean this too.”

“I don’t know what you think you mean.” She steps forward, meaning to push him back. “I…”

“…You’re not a Lady. Alright.” He does not so much as rock back on his heels. “And I’m not a Lord. Not really. But I am here. And here is where I mean to stay.”

She shakes her head. It is an incremental movement and yet it gives away the game. “The Stormlands, the…”

“Seven Hells, Arya!” he yells, “Ser Davos can see to it. He says my cousin taught him the way of words and as a reader I make a great blacksmith.” 

She smiles then. The old man has been at Gendry’s side whenever he was not at Jon’s, he seems to have a collection of these bastard boys. Her bastard boys, she thinks.

He doesn’t see the smile, is too far gone in the building of unwieldy word upon unwieldy word. “If you bid me gone, I’ll… well… I’ll go but you’ll have to tell me the truth of it.”

“The truth of it?”

“Aye. None of this Lords and castles and leathers shit. None of the wife and lady…” He shakes his head hard like he is angry at the words, “You can tell me straight as they come that you don’t love me.”

She opens her mouth. She means to tell him. She just needs to get her face right to do it. “I’m not that girl in the Riverlands anymore.” 

And she isn’t No one. She needs to learn how to be Arya again. She is certain she cannot do it here.

“No,” he says and she almost believes he knows her. “And I’m not that boy. That isn’t an answer.”

“Gendry.”

The bottomless hope he seems to have shifts in his face, he lifts his chin, “If the next words you say aren’t, I don’t and never will love you, I’m putting this below decks.” He hefts his hammer on to his shoulder. “I don’t imagine you care much for what’s proper so I’ll be putting in with milady.”

She could always kill him, she supposes.

“Have you ever been on a boat before? Do you even know how to swim?”

He grins the kind of grin she wants to press against her lips, “No, but I’m good at not falling out.”

**Author's Note:**

> I mean... honestly... it needed doing


End file.
